Are Minimal Radial Distortion Solvers Really Necessary for Relative Pose Estimation?

Estimating the relative pose between two cameras is a fundamental step in many applications such as Structure-from-Motion. The common approach to relative pose estimation is to apply a minimal solver inside a RANSAC loop. Highly efficient solvers exist for pinhole cameras. Yet, (nearly) all cameras exhibit radial distortion. Not modeling radial distortion leads to (significantly) worse results. However, minimal radial distortion solvers are significantly more complex than pinhole solvers, both in terms of run-time and implementation efforts. This paper compares radial distortion solvers with two simple-to-implement approaches that do not use minimal radial distortion solvers: The first approach combines an efficient pinhole solver with sampled radial undistortion parameters, where the sampled parameters are used for undistortion prior to applying the pinhole solver. The second approach uses a state-of-the-art neural network to estimate the distortion parameters rather than sampling them from a set of potential values. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets, and different camera setups, show that complex minimal radial distortion solvers are not necessary in practice. We discuss under which conditions a simple sampling of radial undistortion parameters is preferable over calibrating cameras using a learning-based prior approach. Code and newly created benchmark for relative pose estimation under radial distortion are available at https://github.com/kocurvik/rdnet.

A method for estimating roadway billboard salience

Roadside billboards and other forms of outdoor advertising play a crucial role in marketing initiatives; however, they can also distract drivers, potentially contributing to accidents. This study delves into the significance of roadside advertising in images captured from a driver's perspective. Firstly, it evaluates the effectiveness of neural networks in detecting advertising along roads, focusing on the YOLOv5 and Faster R-CNN models. Secondly, the study addresses the determination of billboard significance using methods for saliency extraction. The UniSal and SpectralResidual methods were employed to create saliency maps for each image. The study establishes a database of eye tracking sessions captured during city highway driving to assess the saliency models.